Review: Dead Space Shooter Will Shock You

I don’t scare easily. It’s not a machismo thing: I’m just not exactly unnerved by the monsters-in-the-closet scenarios that get recycled so often in horror-themed videogames.

But Dead Space started to get to me. I played this PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC shooter wearing headphones, with the lights off and the blinds drawn. The clanking machinery and the sounds of monsters scurrying through vents set the eerie tone. But what set me off was the whispering — barely audible, manic whispering — that reverberated down empty hallways and corridors.

Is someone still alive? Or is this just the onset of the dementia that reportedly plagued so much of the population of the abandoned spaceship I was exploring?

And then, someone started singing nursery rhymes.

Dead Space‘s story and atmosphere are well done. And it would have been enough to send me scampering to the safety of a brightly lit room, except for the fact that the production values couldn’t make up for the uninspired gameplay.

As the game begins, a crew of four has crash-landed on the USG Ishimura, a spaceship that was home to over a thousand people. The ship was designed to tear apart small planets and asteroids, mining them of their precious minerals. Something has gone wrong, however, and a distress call has been sent out. Your team is the first to respond, only to find that the ship’s population has vanished.

At the start of the game, things look grim: Your ship is damaged beyond repair, the only member of your crew with a gun isn’t much help, and you’re all quickly separated from one another. It’s a big ship, and as engineer Isaac Clarke, it’s up to you to face down relentless hordes of space zombies, find your obligatory love interest, and figure out what exactly is going on.

Where is everyone, anyway? That’s the chief question of the game, and the story is doled out in tantalizing text, audio and video logs without a single cut scene in sight. You’ll get the gist of what went down on the Ishimura by just playing through the game, but to get the full story you’ll want to scour every inch of the ship to find clues the victims left behind. Even the writing on the walls tells a story — from the terror-stricken crew leaving each other warning messages, to the amorous notes left in the bathrooms stalls.

The interface, too, is designed to make you panic, mostly insomuch as there really is no interface. There are no gauges or meters superimposed on the screen — your life bar and ammo meters are printed directly on your character’s suit and weapons. When you access your inventory or objectives screen, the menu hangs in the air right in front of you. While there is a pause function for emergency snack runs, you can only access your inventory in real time: If you’re going to check the map, or read that log you just found, you’d better make sure the area is actually safe first.

Real immersion is a lofty goal, and Dead Space just about nails it. But it is a horror game, after all. Is it horrifying? No, not really.Dead Space falls into the widely popular shock-horror pit that’s been an industry staple since Doom first hid an imp in the wall behind a suit of armor.

Here’s a scenario that’s played out all too often: You’re walking down a hallway, listening to the voices in your head. Suddenly, the music surges, and a tentacled attack-fetus clambers out of a vent, followed by a few more baddies. You charge, your adrenaline pumping thanks to the furious pace of the music, and get to severing limbs and thwacking foes. Then the music calms down and the enemies leave items behind for you to pick up. Now imagine that this scene is repeated throughout the entire course of the game, with little variation.

Eventually, you realize that these "surprise" attacks are going to come at highly telegraphed points in the game: Right before you press a button or pick up an important item on the floor, or immediately following a save point. How am I supposed to be scared when I know exactly when the monsters are going to show up?

The shooting gameplay isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either. Dead Space‘s enemy encounters rely on what the developers call "strategic dismemberment." You can’t just go for the head shot — you have to weaken enemies by shooting off their limbs. But there are only a handful of different enemies, and once you find their weak spots, nothing is fundamentally different — you’re just replacing the head shot with the tentacle shot.

Apart from being gruesomely gratifying, dismembering enemies helps you conserve ammo. But then you stumble upon the Store, an automated, infinite source of supplies that uses the money you find scattered about the deserted ship. Why people left thousands of dollars just lying around everywhere is beyond me, but thanks to the Store you’ll have all the ammo and health packs you could ever want.

Consider the original Resident Evil, a game that managed to evoke a very particular sort of abject terror that few games have been able to create since. It wasn’t the presence of a monster that struck fear in us — we knew there were evil things residing nearby, because it said so on the box. It was the careful monitoring of resources, scrambling about for ammunition and healing supplies, and finding the best way to defeat an enemy, which in most cases was to run right past them. The zombies were slow and loud. You weren’t terrified because you could hear a group of them shuffling toward you — you were terrified because you only had half a clip in your pistol and two shotgun shells left. Take them on, and how would you fight the next group? Survival meant making these difficult decisions.

While Dead Space certainly isn’t the only game to load you up with too many supplies, knowing that you’re armed to the teeth definitely detracts from the terror. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t make sense, story-wise: If getting your hands on a gun on the Ishimura was as simple as walking down the hall and ponying up a few credits, why are there almost no survivors?

Dead Space is a rigidly linear game. You’re lead to each section of the ship in order, and you’ve got to fix, turn on or destroy four to eight somethings in every stage before you can fight the boss. The game’s helpful Locator system can project a laser guide directly toward the place you’re trying to find if you get lost or disoriented.

There’s nothing wrong per se with linear games, but if any next-gen game deserved the Super Metroid treatment, allowing us to backtrack and roam freely throughout the entire ship, it was this one. What would be the harm in allowing us to go back for things we might have missed, or just to wander about?

Don’t get me wrong: Dead Space is a lot of fun. The story is phenomenal, and gets a bit of help from the esteemed Warren Ellis. Paging through the logs will reveal quite the unexpected tale, inspired by a certain infamous real-world, quasi-religious organization. Dead Space‘s atmosphere is brilliant, evoking nerve-wracking paranoia, but the gameplay is the same as many other previous games.

Bear all that in mind going in, and Dead Space won’t disappoint you.

WIRED Phenomenal setting, story and atmosphere

TIRED Rigidly linear, feels too similar to other games, not much replay value